Left Coast.

Taking Poetic License With Vanity Plates

LOS ANGELES — There are more than 1.3 million vanity license plates on the roads of California, and to hear Daniel Nussbaum tell it, every one of them has a story.

The letters and numbers vary, but usually they spell some variation of "Look At Me, Aren't I Clever," modern America's modest message of Me.

Sometimes when he is feeling especially cosmic, Nussbaum looks beyond the surface narcissism radiating all around him from the cars limping along the freeways and sees something else.

The Bronx-born writer sees patterns, beautiful patterns of words, mixing and coalescing, then breaking apart as cars enter and depart the on-ramps and off-ramps of life, patterns of plates coming together again in random combination to form longer thoughts and even stories. Literally, a pop poetry in motion.

"What's going on is an expression of a collective universe," said Nussbaum, 44. "There's this active creativity that's occurred. . . . There's this power on the roads of California that is coalescing and breaking up. I pull out pieces of this master work and try to mold it and make some sense of it."

Well, that's only a theory, of course, the wry writer admits with a laugh, and "a pretty far-out" one at that.

But Nussbaum has turned his vision into a new California art form, the language of Platespeak, incorporating the words and messages contained on the state's license plates into short stories and poems.

Samples of Nussbaum's work have appeared in Harper's and Playboy magazines, spreading the pulse of the Pacific Coast Highway across the country. Next month, two dozen of his unique short stories, retold tales ranging from "EEE TEEE" (ETFNHM) to "OEDIPUS" (LVMYMRS, LVMYKDS) will appear in his first book-length collection, titled "PL8SPK," to be published by HarperCollins West.

Nussbaum's rules are simple. All the words and even the titles are lifted directly from the California Department of Motor Vehicles' computerized printout of registered vanity license plates. He uses each plate only once per story, and does not edit or change the plates, "in any way, ever," he says. He does add punctuation, however.

Thus, for Vladimir Nabokov's classic work, there is this, taken from four separate plates: "LOLITA: ID8JLB8T. SOAMI AA PERV?" The essence of Hamlet is "2BORWAT?" Lady Godiva is "IH8CLOZ." And for the film "Goodfellas," or "GUD FELAS," he invokes the Joe Pesci character's memorable question: "IAMUZEU?"

Scouring the lists for words he could use has made Nussbaum something of an authority on California plates. In his research he has discovered, for instance, that there are 163 different versions of"awesome" registered here and no less than 55 ways to pronounce oneself "excellent."

Then there is the vast insult genre and an amazingly lengthy list of self-putdown plates, from "WASHDUP" to the cheerful "IMSLFSH" down to the sad-sack depths of "IBAPUTZ."

California leads the nation, not surprisingly, in the number of vanity plates, registering 500 new ones each day, though Virginia has more per capita. Few states, however, are more liberal than California in what it allows to be paraded across its roads, Nussbaum said.

The state has no problem with "bitchin," for instance. And the officials who banned the word "wop," a derogatory term for Italian-Americans, relented and allowed it back in use after "Italian-Americans complained, they wanted it on their plates," said Nussbaum.

Vanity plates reflect vanity, all right, of all shapes and sizes. But maybe they also reflect something else.

"They're not entirely literate," Nussbaum said, "but maybe they're the death rattle of what used to be a literate country."

Will it play in Berlin?

Vanity plates do not seem to be something that Markus Gunther noticed during his recent two-month stay in Southern California, but the German journalist missed little else during a summer exchange stint at the Los Angeles Times.

In a farewell observation of the Southland, as the TV guys insist on referring to the L.A. area, Gunther noted he had trouble buying simple things such as regular yogurt-not the fat-free or flavored kind-and that coffee was a new life experience.

For that matter, carwashes, California style, also were eye-openers. "In Germany a carwash is boring. Here it is a place of worship," Gunther wrote. "My favorite carwash in L.A. impressed me with its unique architecture-a very authentic mixture of a New England Country home and the villa of a Roman patrician."